The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report.
Welcome, Welcome, welcome. The Pro America Report. This is Ryan Hite continuing a week of filling in here for Mr. Ed Martin, who is out on assignment. And I am glad to be back with you today. Go to proamericareport.com and Phyllisschlafly.com proamericareport.com is where you’re going to find Ed’s substack and all the things he’s writing about Phyllisschlafly.com. Of course, the archives of the Pro America Report. The podcast The Stand alone segments, links and resources and the All Important WYNK e-mail sign up. There is where you don’t want to miss it. Go there, sign up for the WYNK e-mail every weekday morning. You will not be sorry, you won’t miss out. Let’s kick off into it.
There is a coming danger. That is well, it’s it’s not new. This is definitely not new as far as a danger to the electoral system in America, but it’s one that I see come back over and over again. It’s like a bad penny it. Just won’t go Away and it is something I think we need to talk about because they continue the they, those forces that continue to pump millions of dollars into this and time and effort, they are very good at repackaging this idea, making it sound like something exciting, something helpful. Something trustworthy, but in fact it. It is all just the proverbial lipstick getting put on a pig. And what am I talking about?
I am talking about Dark leftist money, leftist dark money pushing ranked choice voting.
Now, ranked choice voting is something you may have heard of before. It also goes under a few other names, so let me get into a definition here to make sure that you and I both know exactly what we’re talking about, and then I’m going to give you the what the the the quick one liner. What you need to know, and then we’re gonna dive off into a little bit of a of a conversation and an understanding around this topic, because I think that it is something we must be very vigilant about, very informed about and ready to fight against it, because as we’ve just seen this week in municipal elections, particularly school board elections across the country, there is not a very big group of registered voters who are ready to get out and do. The really simple stuff, the really easy stuff, the November elections are a whole different ball game and and you know, don’t don’t hear me bashing voters. But it’s just it’s a different ball game. So many people come out to the November elections. That’s why stuff like this, you will see ballot initiatives appear on the November election. There’s more people and they are more uninformed. And of course I don’t mean you, obviously not you and me. We are informed voters. I’m sure if you’re listening to this program. You know, I’m really. I’m not kidding. I’m. I’m quite certain you’re an informed voter. But here, let let me back up. So ranked choice voting. You’re getting off into the weeds. Sorry about that. We get there’s a lot happening this week getting into the weeds.
Ranked choice voting. Also known as an instant runoff system. What this is is instead of choosing one candidate, voters would rank all of the candidates in a given race from favorite to least favorite, so if no candidate you that you understand if you’ve got a hypothetically 5 candidates, you’re going to rank them in the order that you like them numbers 1, 2, 3,4, 5, your favorite to your least favorite candidate. So if no candidate gets more than 50% of votes. Based on the voters first choice. An instant runoff takes place. Now. This instant runoff, you may ask, probably done by a computer. Certainly not hand counted balance. I’m. I’m quite sure of that. But an instant runoff takes place, meaning the candidate with the least number of votes is eliminated. So people who voted for that candidate basically automatically recast their vote for the second choice. And then this process repeats itself with runoff after runoff until a candidate gets more than 50% on a single round of voting.
Now. Make no mistake, there are states around the country that have run off elections, but that is not this. A two round runoff is very different than an instant runoff, and this is what you need to know.
What you need to know is the instant runoff system. Ranked choice voting is essentially manipulation of our elections by the elites. Ranked choice voting is manipulation of our election by the elites. That’s what you need to know. There is a lot of dark money behind this, so so let’s talk about this for just a second. The process and then I want to get into who’s behind it because we are seeing these efforts and initiatives pop up all over the place and it must be addressed. It’s incredibly important. So here.
Unlike the regular runoff elections that we see and and you know how that works, I mean, Missouri doesn’t have them. But I know that Oklahoma does. Georgia does. There’s a lot of states that do. The way that that works is is everyone comes to the polls, we all vote and out of if there’s four candidates and none of them receives A majority result or or 50% or more, an absolute majority.
Then typically what happens we have another election date scheduled about a month away and the two highest vote getters go into that election and now we all come back and choose between these two instead of among these five different people. So we continue to have basically a a run off and everyone continues to vote. Each time until a majority and and I I say each time you know what I mean? There’s one, a majority at the end of this process, a majority is demanded of the people who came and voted. We must do this until one person, one candidate receives approval from a majority of the voters. Who voted. That sounds reasonable to me. I like that system. In fact, I I I like the idea of that, because what are we doing?
We are taking away the ability to win an election in this state, this region, whatever, whatever municipality or or governance this is. We’re taking away the ability to win by plurality. And what that means plurality versus majority. Plurality means you just got more than anyone else, but that doesn’t mean you got the majority of everyone involved.
So we see this all the time. We had this in a pretty contentious primary in 2016, there were four, I think 4 maybe there were five. There were four pretty big name candidates running in the Republican gubernatorial primary here in Missouri, and there were big groups of people behind each of these four in the primary. They had pretty big sections of support. Well, one person won with 33, I think it was 35% of the vote and it it’s, you know, at this point, Missouri is a pretty red state. Whoever wins the Republican primary very likely is going to go on to be the governor. This person essentially now got a majority in the in the general election, but he did not get a majority of Republicans to approve him as the nominee. He only got 35%. That’s a plurality.
So let’s think about this. If you want to turn our nation into an instant runoff system or a state or or whatever. Whatever. What whatever level of government we’re talking about here, what you’re doing is, you know, proponents of this will claim that this gets rid of bickering. This gets rid of attack ads that this will give a lot of security. And. Instant quick votes and results to the, not votes, quick results to the electoral process.
But in every place across the country where this has been put down in places across the world where this kind of ranked choice voting, RCV or an instant run off, again, you’re gonna hear different names for it. But but listen to the process because that’s where you can tell what this is. I I’ve even had that someone walked up to me here in Missouri one time and asked, hey, would you sign our petition? We’re trying to get this on the ballot. And you look at it and say. Now, how do you explain this to me? Is this ranked choice voting? Ohh no, no no, this isn’t ranked choice voting, it’s and they proceed to explain an instant runoff system. I say yeah, yeah, that’s ranked choice voting. No. I’m. I’m not signing the petition. I don’t want that. We don’t need that. That’s what happens. Because this, this is a real thing.
There’s several problems with this. I mean, first of all, you look at the plurality thing alone, Australia is a big example. They have ranked choice voting. In the 2010 House of House of Representatives elections. They’re equivalent to the House of Reps. The Labour Party won the House with 38% of first place votes, even though the other party, the Liberal National Coalition, received 43% of first place votes, because it was all in how it worked out how the computer. Put everything together and how it moves forward.
You’re asking voters to hypothetically strategize 3rd and 4th and 5th and 6th rounds of elimination rather than just focusing on their first choice among the top tier candidates or a party or a system or whatever it is.
And the problem, another big problem with this. People don’t mark everything. This is called ballot exhaustion. You’re gonna find a lot of people who just rank their top few and leave blank spaces after that. Well, guess what, if if their top voice, votes, their top choices are eliminated, their ballot no longer counts.
So we we’ve seen this come into a mass. Massive consequence in places like San Francisco, the 2011 mayoral race ran on ranked choice voting. Ballot exhaustion resulted in 27% of voters being silenced in that election because they didn’t fully mark out their ballots. They didn’t end up having a say in the final result.
This is a bad news system and it’s being pushed by huge dark money groups. Leftist dark money groups, because why? It creates a power vacuum.
What this does is it supplants completely our structured system of people voting and having a say. And instead it creates a system that is going to essentially hand over this ambiguous power to people behind the scenes.
It’s a manipulation of the election, make no mistake, and there are coming down the pike, several initiatives in several different states that are trying to get ranked choice voting on the ballot. I think that there are 6 to 10 states right now. That may have it on the ballot this November. We have got to be armed with information against this. We’ve got to be telling people about it because this would blow up our our traditional party primary system in America and replace it with with I think that the the what I’ve heard described best as a jungle primary. It’s going to be awful.
Ranked choice voting, instant runoff. This is bad news and it’s got big donors pushing it across the country because it’s it’s it’s it’s elite choice voting, that’s essentially what it is. It hands over the power to the elites and we see it time and time again. We’ll talk a little bit about it. There’s tons of examples. Alaska and Maine are the primary states that have ranked choice voting at the state level. We could go into some major examples there. I might do it, come back in the wrap up and we’ll talk about that. So stick around after the after the guests and get on back to the wrap up. We’re gonna talk about it.
Go to ProAmericaReport.com, go to phyllisschlafly.com but we are out of time here in the first segment. So stick around. After the break we will be right back here on the Pro America Report.
